NAME
iopl - change I/O privilege level SYNOPSIS
#include
int iopl(int level); DESCRIPTION iopl() changes the I/O privilege level of the calling process, as spec‐ ified by the two least significant bits in level. This call is necessary to allow 8514-compatible X servers to run under Linux. Since these X servers require access to all 65536 I/O ports, the ioperm(2) call is not sufficient. In addition to granting unrestricted I/O port access, running at a higher I/O privilege level also allows the process to disable inter‐ rupts. This will probably crash the system, and is not recommended. Permissions are inherited by fork(2) and execve(2). The I/O privilege level for a normal process is 0. This call is mostly for the i386 architecture. On many other architec‐ tures it does not exist or will always return an error. RETURN VALUE
On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set appropriately. ERRORS EINVAL level is greater than 3. ENOSYS This call is unimplemented. EPERM The calling process has insufficient privilege to call iopl(); the CAPSYSRAWIO capability is required to raise the I/O privi‐ lege level above its current value. CONFORMING TO
iopl() is Linux-specific and should not be used in programs that are intended to be portable. NOTES Libc5 treats it as a system call and has a prototype in
. Glibc1 does not have a prototype. Glibc2 has a prototype both in and in . Avoid the latter, it is available on i386 only. SEE ALSO ioperm(2), outb(2), capabilities(7) COLOPHON This page is part of release 3.53 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
Linux 2013-03-15 IOPL(2)